Friday, December 8, 2017

They say they suffered ‘cruel and sadistic’ abuse as kids at Ontario training schools

Little red gulag

The Ontario government has secretly settled hundreds of lawsuits alleging historic sexual, physical and emotional abuse by teachers and staff at provincially run schools for troubled youth, a Star investigation has found.

Staff and teachers were accused of sodomizing students, forcing them to perform oral sex, and pushing them to engage in “scrambles,” a sort of fight club where students were encouraged to beat one another.

The Star’s investigation has uncovered 220 legal settlements in which the province made payouts to victims ranging from several thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a condition of settlement, victims had to sign confidentiality agreements, what some former residents, now in their late 50s, referred to as “gag orders.”

“The government doesn’t want people knowing what they did to us,” said Steven Greenwood, a former student at a school in Hagersville.

Each of these young boys and girls had been sent by Ontario court judges and provincial government officials between 1960 and 1984 to “training schools” — residential institutions in places such as Simcoe, Bowmanville and Cobourg. These young people, many from broken families, struggling with poverty, or addicted to drugs, had been deemed “unmanageable” or “incorrigible.” (more...)